Sensopia, creator of reality augmentation app MagicPlan, announced today a $1.2 million round of funding and the release of a development kit to embed its software in any application.

The funding will accelerate Sensopia’s growth and development to make the MagicPlan application easy and accessible to normal users. MagicPlan lets you take a photo of your environment and generate a floor plan in minutes. The application can automatically measure, draw, and publish a floor plan by taking a photo with your iOS device. MagicPlan was released earlier this year and uses augmented reality and reality capturing technology to create a floor plan.

With the increased funding, the founders are working on enabling three-dimensional room capture and making the application even simpler.

“We are confident that in the coming year, given the energy and attention we put into research, MagicPlan will take reality capture to an entirely new level of simplicity and intuitiveness,” CEO Pierre Gaubil said in a statement. “These are the keys to gaining mass usage.”

Company reps state the app already has 4 million downloads and sees 20,000 floor plans created each day. The company is releasing an Android version of the software this summer and will give even more users access across multiple platforms.

Sensopia’s Software Development Kit (SDK) released today allows MagicPlan’s core technology be integrated into other applications. It will be easier than ever for companies to access and leverage quick and easy floor plan creation technology, the company said.

This is the Montreal-based company’s first round of funding. The popular MagicPlan application has received several awards and has been Apple’s App of the Week in 93 countries.

Photo via Sensopia.com

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“The world around you is not what it seems,” says Ingress, the virtual game that uses the real world as its gamespace. And, perhaps, when Google’s semi-independent division Niantic Labs is finished with its mission, we humans won’t be, either.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and usable. Note carefully that Google says nothing about the Internet in that statement.

In the last few eye-blinks of human history, we’ve created virtual worlds: cyberspace, virtual reality, the World Wide Web … places that exist in our devices, on our computers, in our servers, on the internet, and in our heads. But there’s also a space in which we live and walk and eat and breathe. Realspace. Meatspace. IRL. The real world, so we say, that we can touch and taste and smell.

Google’s trying to bring those world together, partly through the work of Niantic Labs.

Augmented reality is nothing new, of course, with marketing-focused companies like Layar building connections between physical and virtual reality and Ikea’s most-downloaded branded app of 2012 doing similar things. Other startups have explored AR capabilities as well, such as Caterina Fake’s Findery, which invites people to leave geo-tied notes that others can discover and read.

But when a company with the resources of a Google tackles the problem, and has a tool in Google Glass that seems destined for significant developer (and probably user) penetration that can actually create interconnections between the real and the virtual perhaps more efficiently than any other previous product, you’ve got something interesting. And potentially huge.

So a couple of weeks ago, I chatted with the man who’s leading that effort.

John Hanke: the missionary of mapping

John Hanke is vice president of product for Niantic Labs, the year-old Google-but-not-Google division of just a few dozen engineers that brought us Field Trip, the app to explore the world around us with a virtual docent. And, of course, the virtual/real game Ingress.

Source: LinkedIn

John Hanke

Before Niantic, Hanke ran Google Maps, Google Earth, and other geo areas, and before Google, he was the cofounder and CEO of Keyhole, the innovative geo-mapping and visualization company. Google bought Keyhole in 2004, which brought Hanke in the search engine’s fold to lead the its maps, earth, street view, and local divisions.

Now, he told me, rather than let him leave to scratch his entrepreneurial itch yet again and do another startup, Google gave him a semi-autonomous group to, as his LinkedIn profile suggests, experiment at the “intersection of mobility, real world, and the Internet.”

“We set up Niantic as a group that could explore new types of mobile apps with ubiquitous always-on features,” Hanke said. “And we’re set up to act like a start-up.”

Virtual + physical = field trip

Field Trip was one of Niantic’s first creations, and while on the surface it’s an app that helps you find cool stuff, ultimately it’s a tool to merge metadata and data and then present them together. While you’re in the physical world, Field Trip pulls data about that experience from digital sources, feeding you that information, and changing — deepening, enriching — your experience of place. Layering with with history, perhaps, or science, or culture.

Because, after all, one rock is very much like another rock, but if this is the precise rock where Geronimo attacked Mexican soldiers armed with only a knife and his courage, that changes our experience of this particular place. And the merging/melding/layering of virtual and physical makes it more real, in a sense — hyperreal.

Source: John Koetsier

Google’s Field Trip app helps you explore “reality.”

Enabling that, of course, requires extensive virtual enhancement of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get world.

“One of the things that we’re trying to evangelize is the concept of geo-tagging everything,” Hanke told me. “I would have expected eight years ago that it would be ubiquitous now, but it’s still not. But I think we’ll get there.”

Geotagging everything digital is a key intersection point between virtual and real. If this blog post is written here, and not there, that adds flavor and nuance to the information. And if a particular historical fact is geotagged to a specific mapped location, that adds depth and dimension to our experience of that place.

“We’re applying some of the same techniques we currently use in standard web search, and the same kind of discipline, to pull really interesting, really good places up from everything else,” Hanke says. “The model is that you’re walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, but with a friend who is telling you the best things around you. You enjoy it just like before, but you’re a little more informed.”

AR + MMO + IRL

Depth and dimension are definitely core components of Ingress, another Niantic Labs app/experiment/game. Ingress is a — take a deep breath — augmented reality massively multiplayer online video game.

The real world is real, but it’s fought over virtually by two shadowy groups: the Enlightened and the Resistance. Niantic has filled the Earth with virtual portals, usually coincident with actual physical landmarks or monuments, that players need to capture in order to gain territory. Capture territory with large numbers of people (aka “mind units”) and your faction gets more powerful.

Clearly, the massive integration of Google mapping technology with a sophisticated gaming engine is required. And the result is another intersection between the real and the virtual.

“Ingress is a massively multiplayer online game designed for mobile, with real location-based connections,” Hanke told me.

You play with everyone in your faction, and you might meet up with other players in real life, or you may just know them virtually as team members in another area. Along the way, Google learns an awful lot about how you use your mobile devices, about mapping physical locations, and about overlaying cyberspace on meatspace.

Source: Google

Ingress’ field of play is the world, layered with virtual data.

All of that knowledge is going to come in very handy with Google Glass.

Endgame: Google Glass?

Hanke is cautious when speaking about Google Glass, as is the PR handler who is copiloting our conversation. Even already public information is a question mark as we chat: Google is definitely being Apple-like in the control and distribution of Glass and its future.

But something tantalizing tidbits do come out.

“We definitely kinda had Google Glass in mind when we started work on apps at Niantic,” Hanke says. “We need mobile devices that are less intrusive than the phone is.”

Source: Google

A model demonstrates Google’s new Project Glass technology.

And we need devices with different input/output modalities, he says. After all, it’s not easy to play Ingress running around holding an expensive and fragile device in front of you like a window ripped from its frame. And yet you need that portal from the physical to the virtual. For instance, while Field Trip is great to open the doors on human context for the world around us, it threatens to detract from our experience of the world by redirecting our eyes from the ultimate big screen of reality to the small screen of our mobile device.

Google Glass, on the other hand, sits unobtrusively on our foreheads, leaving our hands free and providing data as an overlay on top of the physical world rather than an alternative to the physical world. That model of layering, mixing, and intersecting is top-of-mind for Hanke.

“It just can’t be the case that people are walking around heads down tapping on a screen,” he says. “That just can’t be the future of the human race.”

Cyborg me now

Which, of course, is exactly what’s at issue: the future of the human race. Or, at least how we ingest, consume, and reconstitute digital data. And analog data. And meld the two into one harmonious whole of knowing.

That’s perhaps a little metaphysical for a small division of Google that focuses on maps and games and apps.

But the web has rewired our brains in a decade or so of virtually ubiquitous Internet access, and the smartphone has rewired our behavior in five years, taking us from creatures who look up to to see others to beings that look down at any opportunity to see small bits of plastic and glass and metal in our hands.

So is it really too much to expect from a transformation that brings us from clear divisions between what is real and what is virtual to an elegant blend of the two?

“This is not psychosis or some cognitive break, but an actual takeover of the mind,” Google’s introductory video for the Ingress game says ominously.

Art imitates life, I suppose, and life, in turn, imitates art.

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for the most exciting new Google product in perhaps … ever.

Of course, he is 57 years old, was born in the 1950s, and was the CEO of a boring enterprise software company, Novell, before joining the much more au courant Google.

But it’s not just that he’s an old fuddy-duddy. He’s right.

A Google Glass future in which we all have smart devices perched on our noses, in which we’re all viewing digital streams of content while simultaneously navigating the physical world, then touching our eyewear and speaking to it, is very, very odd.

An alternative, of course, is gesture control, and Leap Motion, which was recently integrated into Google Earth, and has announced its intentions of bringing embedded gesture control not just to PCs but also to “watches, smartphones, and glasses.” But while waving and motioning to your headgear may be less disruptive in social settings — and more realistic in busy, noisy environments — it’s also going to make for fairly odd behavior.

In the future, we’ll all have Tourrette’s syndrome.

That’s something Schmidt is recognizing, saying that there are clearly places where Google Glass would be inappropriate. The locker room, for example, and other places where there’s an expectation of privacy.

But it does mean that our current cultural go-to move in unfamiliar social settings — head down, checking your smartphone — will need some updating for a future in which everyone carries smart video cameras on their heads that are always connected to the Internet.

Another problem with the augmented-reality devices?

“If you like eye contact, I’m sorry, you lost,” Schmidt said.

Sounds like a paradise for geeks. For others, I’m not so sure. Perhaps talking to an iWatch will be less weird. At least, thanks to Dick Tracy, we have some cultural precedent for that.

Photo credit: Jolie O’Dell/Flickr, Chris Chabot/Google

Sergey Brin is listed as one of the inventors of a binocular Google Glass device that the Mountain View company recently patented. It doubles the amount of virtual vision space that it can overlay in an augmented reality display and uses laser-positioning beams to fine-tune image alignment on what in most cases will be a curved and sometimes flexing surface: the inside of the glasses’ lens.

Unfortunately, it could also be much less cool than the Geordi LaForge-style one-lens Google Glass that we’ve all seen:

Source: USPTO

Google Glass(es)

The key challenge that this invention for binocular head-mounted displays is designed to overcome? Not making users dizzy and potentially sick.

As the patent application states:

One technological hurdle to overcome to further encourage marketplace adoption of HMD technology is identifying and compensating for binocular HMD deformation. Deformation of a binocular HMD can lead to deleterious misalignment between the left and right image displays of the binocular HMD. These misalignments can result in a blurred or otherwise compromised image as perceived by the user, which ultimately leads to a poor user experience (disorientation, dizziness, etc.). Deformation can occur due to a variety of reasons including misuse, poor user fit, nonsymmetrical facial features, harsh environmental factors (e.g., thermal warping), or otherwise.

Essentially, if the glasses change shape for any reason, the image will warp, and this will compromise your user experience. It’s yet another example of how the most amazing inventions — full-scale augmented reality in a pair of glasses — can have issues with the simplest of problems: Our heads are not all the same shape or size.

But Google is sweating the details in a very Apple-like way to ensure Glass will have a great user experience whether you use one eye or two.

For more images from the patent application, scroll through this gallery:

Two groups met, one in New York, and one in San Francisco, and built “over 80 new ways to use Glass” over the course of the two-day session. They worked next to Google engineers, provided feedback on the platform, and saw the still-confidential Google Glass API, which developers and hardware manufacturers will use to build technologies and software that integrate with Google Glass.

Participants were basically sworn to secrecy about the API and any other details of the events, but Ryan Warner, an Android developer who was there, did give some feedback on the Google Developers post:

“Glass foundry was awesome!!” he commented.

Typically, the comments then devolved into an ad hominem discussion on the relative merits of MacBooks for development (small selection: “over-price pieces of trash,” and “the best laptop hardware you can get”). Kids will be kids.

Some photos:

The next chance for non-Google engineers and augmented reality enthusiasts to learn a bit more about Google Glass? The South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas:

If you’d like to know more about developing for Glass and you’ll be at SXSW this year, we recommend you attend Building New Experiences with Glass (http://goo.gl/pLoUu) with +Timothy Jordan  on Monday, March 11th at 5pm in Ballroom A of the Austin Convention Center.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Trak Lord 

Augmented reality (AR) may seem like a futuristic concept, but it will be a reality of our digital lives in 2013. AR is a new technology that blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer generated by enhancing what we hear, see and feel. Next year, I predict that it will be everywhere. Here are my five reasons why:

The glasses are coming, the glasses are coming!

Whether it’s Google’s Project Glass or concept videos along the lines of “Sight”, the Internet can’t get enough of Terminator Vision. A few companies have however made some pretty impressive technological leaps this year: this fall, Vuzix debuted their monocular AR prototype for industrial use at the annual InsideAR conference; Innovega showcased their Augmented Reality contact lens prototype at the 2012 Consumer Electronic show, for which they’re currently seeking FDA approval; and researchers at the University of Washington successfully displayed a single pixel on an eye (albeit, that of a rabbit).

In the meantime, retails brands like Oakley and game favorite Valve were just as quick to throw their hats in the ring alongside patent applications from tech giants Apple and Microsoft. But don’t bother Santa with your letters – widely available (and affordable) wearable augmented reality devices probably won’t hit shelves until 2014.

Smartphones will be AR-equipped

We might not get Paul Smith AR goggles anytime soon, but expect OEMs, handset manufacturers and carriers to integrate optimized augmented reality, visual display and camera performance into the next generation of smartphones, because it’s basically already happening.

Premier-to-punchline-to-rising-star Nokia recently launched the City Lens app, exclusive to its Lumia suite of devices. UK-based chip designer ARM has had its eye on AR for a while, powering and optimizing experiences for its architecture found in the Samsung Galaxy SII, SIII and Note devices. And let us not forget Telefonica and their mad dash to serve mobile augmented reality advertisements to the entirety of their O2 network, alongside mobile coupons and location-based services.

Location, Location, Location

GPS and geodata were responsible early on for bringing augmented reality to the forefront. Applications like Junaio and Layar made a splash in the tech world, offering location-based navigational “channels” and “layers” where UFO-like billboards bobbed on the horizon, displaying information about your surroundings. In 2013 expect to see the next generation of those GPS-based experiences, incorporating not only data from on-board sensors like the gyroscope and camera, but other niche mobile technologies that rely on proximity such as NFC.

Companies like Hover are already deeply embedded in generating and augmenting 3-D maps of urban areas, and my company (AR firm Metaio) has successfully developed “snapping algorithms” that pull this kind of data from the cloud and tightly align it to the real world. Expect your city to get a lot more augmented in 2013.

The death of the gimmicky app

Disclaimer: there will always be marketers that abuse useful technology for their own nefarious, poorly designed purposes(re: QR codes), but expect to see brands move to better, faster and stronger apps that give their audience clear incentives for regular use. 3-D bunnies smiling at you from conference marketing material may have seemed novel at the time, but creating a new app for each one-off experience is neither scalable nor tolerable from a user’s perspective.

The 2013 IKEA Catalog app featured an augmented reality viewer that visualized furniture in 3-D and served related video and digital content to readers – and was the most downloaded branded app of 2012, even after launching in July. With that kind of success as a benchmark, expect other companies to start managing entire product lifecycles with augmented reality solutions- not unlike Mitsubishi Electric with their enterprise MeViewAR app that visualizes heating and cooling units in the real world. Mitsubishi Electric has already moved to the next phase for 2013, intending to visualize 3-D maintenance instructions for service technicians.

The birth of the elusive killer app

It doesn’t exist, and it probably won’t. Augmented Reality is a horizontal technology, which means that the nigh-limitless applications make it a challenging endeavor to develop the Evernote-YouTube-Wordpress-Instagram of Augmented Reality. We did however see the AR Angry Birds, and even if it isn’t official it’s still a pretty clear indication that a successful AR game could lead the way for massive adoption. There are already some good examples out there, like the new JengAR game that inserts the 3-D content into the environment itself rather than needing a printed image.

Expect more games to take this approach in 2013 as we move toward experiences that engage users in their actual surroundings. But the most amazing app for which the industry could possibly hope is only peripherally related to augmented reality. 3-D content is tough- it’s difficult and expensive and time-consuming to create, and may present the biggest barrier to producing augmented reality experiences. Augmented reality needs an app that easily generates 3-D content and exports it in major supported formats. Think “Draw Something” meets iMovie, in 3-D.

That would be something.

Trak Lord is the head of US Marketing for Metaio, the leader in augmented reality research and applications. Before joining with Metaio, Trak attended Dartmouth, where he first started working with augmented reality technology, only to relocate to Silicon Valley and consult for social media and augmented reality startups.

Since joining Metaio, Trak has traveled all over the world evangelizing augmented reality and Metaio’s research. He also manages Augmented Reality Blog, the most widely read source in the industry.  

When he’s not at Metaio, Trak enjoys vintage motorcycles, 19th Century French novels and coffee. Lots of coffee. 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With Wallit, a free new iOS app launching today, real-world places are finally getting the equivalent of Facebook walls of their own.

The app lets you leave text, photos, video, and audio messages on virtual walls for specific locations — but only if you’re actually there. The virtual walls are also viewable through a slick augmented reality mode, which lets your Wallit contributions appear like digital graffiti layered on a location.

“We are trying to socialize augmented reality experiences,” Wallit founder and CEO Veysel Berk told VentureBeat in an interview. Berk has experience with building social networking platforms, but with Wallit, he wanted to bring a social aspect to real-world locations as well.

Unlike Foursquare, you can actually hold conversations at locations using Wallit. It also differs from location-based chat services like Yobongo and ChatSquare by allowing you to leave lasting messages at specific locations. Wallit’s augmented reality (AR) aspect, accessible by holding your device in a portrait orientation, takes the conversation a step further by having its virtual walls overlayed on top of your phone’s camera feed.

“With location at the center of our system, augmented reaity is just the natural extension of that,” Berk said. Most other AR apps only allow you to view location-based content, Wallit is one of the few to let you literally leave your mark on a location.

While you can only contribute to Wallit’s virtual walls if you’re actually near a specific location, you can still view entries created on any wall from anywhere in the world. You’ll be able to like and rank specific Wallit posts, and Berk tells me that the company will be using some automatic filtering as well to keep junk entries to a minimum.

The company says that an Android version of its app is on the way. It currently has virtual walls in popular locations like New York, San Francisco, and Paris, but it’s adding more continuously. You can also request a specific wall be created through the Wallit app.

Wallit is based in San Francisco, Calif., and has raised $1.2 million in funding so far from investors including Sharmilla Mulligan, OpenTable Japan president Masao Tehima, Storm Ventures, David Kellogg, and others.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In a bid to make augmented reality more than just a buzzword, AR company Total Immersion will make its D’Fusion Studio software free for developers, it said today. The move should remove a significant barrier to entry towards creating augmented reality apps.

Augmented reality (AR) refers to a view of real-world environments that’s overlayed with digital information. As a proof of concept, the company is launching SkinVaders today, a free iOS game built with D’Fusion Studio that uses your face as its game terrain.  The game involves keeping your face free of alien invaders by tapping on them and popping their eggs. (See trailer below.) Gross? Maybe — but it’s the sort of thing kids will love, and it shows the potential of what other developers can accomplish with AR.

Total Immersion has been working on augmented reality for over 12 years — long before the topic was hip. In an interview yesterday, co-founder and CEO Bruno Uzzan regaled me with tales of how hard it was to evangelize AR a decade ago. At that point, setting up an AR demonstration took an hour, several computers, and lots of cabling. Now, many of us are walking around with AR-capable smartphones in our pockets.

Thanks to the emergence of powerful mobile hardware — in particular, fast mobile processors, high-quality cameras, and improving wireless network speeds — Uzzan believes augmented reality’s time has finally come. While there are plenty of AR-like apps out there, like Google Goggles and Layar’s apps, Total Immersion is one of the few offering “true AR” with its platform, according to Forrester. Total Immersion’s platform lets you superimpose 3D objects on top of real-world views, which gives it a leg-up on some of the lighter AR experiences out there.

The company will make the latest version of its software, D’Fusion Studio 3.2, freely available for developers to use. It supports multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, web, and even Microsoft’s Kinect. But while the software is free, Uzzan tells me the company will work out licensing deals with any developers who choose to use its technology in their apps.

Up until now, Total Immersion has been using its AR expertise to power marketing campaigns for big brands like Paramount Pictures, Hallmark, and Nike. The company decided to offer its software for free after several requests from interested developers.

Even though it’s releasing SkinVaders, Uzzan tells me that Total Immersion isn’t planning to become a game studio anytime soon. SkinVaders took about three months to develop, and another month to test, before it was ready for release. If the game ends up taking off though, the company may change its plans.

Total Immersion has offices in LA, Hong Kong, London, and more. It has received around $13 million in funding so far and has around 90 employees. Uzzan tells me that it has made a good business out of AR so far, so it hasn’t needed to request too much funding. The company also unveiled a new product at the 2007 DEMO conference, where it earned a coveted DEMO God award.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Occipital, the company behind the popular panoramic photo app 360 Panorama, announced today that it has received $7 million in first round funding led by Foundry Group.

The company plans on using the influx of funding to make a big leap: It is going to launch a computer vision platform that other mobile developers can take advantage of for their own projects.

“We’re using computer vision to make real world environments computationally interactive and fun, thereby extending the computational reach of your device into the visual space around you,” Occipital wrote in a blog post today.

The notion of computer vision refers to the ability for computers to extract data from images or video. In the mobile app world, that most often refers to augmented reality offerings like Google Goggles or Yelp’s Monocle feature.

“We’re wholeheartedly approaching augmented reality as a computer vision problem,” Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy told VentureBeat in an email. “That’s why we focus more on computer vision than AR when we explain our focus. The technical challenge in making AR ‘just work’ is one of the hardest problems in computer science right now. It’s something far too time consuming and costly for 99.9 percent of the developers out there to tackle, so we’re taking it on in a big way.”

Reddy said that Occipital has more applications in the wings that will take advantage of its new platform, but he couldn’t offer up any details just yet. The company has learned quite a bit since it launched 360 Panorama, Reddy said, and there’s still more to come for fans of the app. “360 Panorama has been an awesome beta test for us, and will continue to evolve rapidly. In 360, we’re not only doing computer vision on devices, but we’re wrapping it into an experience everyone can understand.”

Occipital added cloud-based processing to 360 Panorama in May, and Reddy said that will also show up in future products.

Boulder, CO based Occipital was founded in 2008 by Reddy and Jeff Powers. In addition to today’s funding, the company is adding new members to its board of directors, including Jason Mendelson and Brad Feld of Foundry Group, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures and Gary Bradski of Willow Garage.

Augmented reality overlays digital information over your view of the physical world in a mobile device’s camera view

The printer demo is significant for a couple of reasons: the application of mobile AR to a service and maintenance scenario, and the sophisticated technology used.

Metaio has a division which works with industrial clients like the car company Volkswagen. For example, a 3D model of a new vehicle can be superimposed over a digital photo of the actual factory environment to help with plan the assembly room layout. This kind of application requires very precise 3D modeling and overlay of the AR image over the real-world image.

For the printer demo, Metaio’s software creates a virtual 3D point cloud (see the video) from the image of the printer in the mobile phone’s camera view. This point cloud defines the structure of the printer. The cloud is then compared to a markerless tracking reference (a sort of “signature” created from 3D CAD models of the printer) so the software can recognize the correct printer model. The software then renders AR objects over the camera view of the printer in real time and with the correct scale in order to instruct the user on how to change the cartridge.

Most mobile AR applications so far have been simple, sometimes gimmicky and according to some commentators not even real AR. Now that the initial novelty has worn off, Metaio is convinced that AR users are looking for more useful applications and, in areas like games and media, higher production values. Replacing the service manual certainly falls into the category of useful.

Improving AR graphics for applications like games is made difficult by the already high processing and battery power required by AR. Metaio worked with ST-Ericsson’s latest dual-core smartphone platform, the U8500, to optimize its AR software to run on that chip set (the printer demo can be seen in the in the ST-Ericsson partner zone at Mobile World Congress).

This increased the frames per second of the AR image rendering from about 18 frames/second on an off-the-shelf smartphone to 30 frames/second on ST Ericsson’s platform, resulting in a much smoother and more accurate AR experience.The company thinks that such partnerships between hardware and AR software vendors are essential to push mobile AR technology forward.

Although the functionality shown in the printer demo is not yet available in Metaio’s mobile AR browser Junaio, the company has been busy adding other interesting features like image recognition and visual search (similar to Google Goggles) including face recognition.

Metaio is based in Munich, Germany, was founded in 2003 and has around 65 employees. It is privately funded.

Augmented reality refers to the use of computer-generated imagery over a live feed of a real-world environment — something usually achieved with a cellphone camera.

According to Osuke Honda from VC fund DCM, a previous investor, the investment will be used to build a bigger, more diverse team and reach out to an international audience — as well as extending the company’s SoLAR gaming platform.

Social gaming is already a multi-billion dollar market in Japan. Leading mobile games portal DeNA, for example, expects to report $576 million in revenue in the six month period from April through September of this  year and is on track to generate over a billion dollars this year. Japan’s other social gaming giant Gree already has 20 million users and an extremely high ARPU. Zynga recently launched a joint venture in Japan with SoftBank.

In July this year Tonchidot launched a social, AR gaming platform for developers called SoLAR which combines location, augmented reality and social play features. Tools to integrate Twitter, Facebook, and payment features for iPhone and Android will be provided in the upcoming October product release.

Tonchidot’s flagship product, an AR app called Sekai Camera, has been downloaded 1 million times and is installed on an estimated 30 percent of all iPhones in Japan. Sekai Camera is available for iPhone in 90 countries and for Android in more than 20 countries. A lightweight version for feature phones just launched.

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The company plans to use the money to build up its bi-coastal team, build its technology, and release a couple of games this year on iPhone and Android phones as well as computers and game consoles. The company has already developed projects for Orange Telecom, SAP and Penguin Publishing, among others.

The funding was led by Chart Venture Partners with participation from CNF Investments and private investors. Chart Venture’s Matthew McCooe and CNF’s Joe Del Guercio will join Ogmento’s board of directors, along with founders Brad Foxhoven, Brian Selzer, and Ori Inbar, who is the CEO. Chart partner Cole Van Nice will join Ogmento’s management team in a CFO/COO position.

“Cole is really a superstar, and we are happy to have him on board. He will take over the operations and our financial planning, coming up with a financial strategy,” says Inbar, adding that the money will give Ogmento enough cash to operate for the next 18-24 months.

Inbar is the author of a leading blog on augmented reality, and co-founders Brad Foxhoven and Brian Selzer have a background in the gaming and entertainment industries. Foxhoven and Selzer have set up companies together before, gaming company Eruptor Entertainment in 1999 and computer-generated animation company Blockade Entertainment in 2007. Foxhoven has also worked for Bioware/Pandemic and IGN Entertainment, well-known companies in the gaming world.

Augmented reality is still a niche technology, but Inbar hopes to see that change soon. “We hope we’ll see the first significant adoption of AR in games this year and will appeal to both hardcore and casual, or even non-gamers. Both the hardware and software have matured, and the technology is ready to go. As far as AR becoming a mainstream technology outside of gaming, though, I think it will be a couple of years. But when it does, it will take over everything we do on devices,” says Inbar.

Ogmento currently employs eight people. Its technical research and development team resides at its New York headquarters, and its creative studio is located in Los Angeles.

AR applications are used to superimpose data over real-world objects seen through a camera (such as a cellphone or game console camera). The biggest challenges in AR is that it is still a fringe technology and generally seen as not yet fully-fledged.

YDreams is a Portuguese company with 10 years of experience developing natural user interfaces (for example, enabling users to interact with devices using hand gestures or other motions instead of tactile interfaces like a keyboard or a mouse). In the joint venture, YDreams will bring its software platform onto Canesta’s hardware. The parties will have an intercompany team working on future product launches, on which Canesta is remaining tight-lipped for the moment. The company feels that YDreams is a “thought-leader in the area of immersive augmented reality (AR) experiences”, as Canesta CEO Jim Spare phrases it.

No newcomer to the scene, YDreams has done over 500 projects for big brands like Coca-Cola, Adidas, Nike, Nokia and BBC and has partnerships with technology giants like Microsoft and Samsung. The collaboration between YDreams and Canesta will hopefully break AR applications out of the confines of technological gimmickry and specific projects like museum installations or retail-store kiosks.

Canesta, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., says its chips can bring the ability to see, or perceive the environment via a camera, to all the hundreds of millions of computers, televisions (see a video demo here) and smartphones on the market. The process of seeing is very complicated to produce artificially, Spare explains.

“Us humans can work with 2D images, which is what we do with still cameras and TV and so on, but for a device to see and understand an object’s location in space, you need a 3-dimensional image. We have been able to reduce the collecting of that 3D image to a small chip and are able to produce it in a low-cost, high-volume manner.”

Canesta is in the product development stage and is not giving out specific numbers as to revenue. The company has raised an impressive $74 million in funding from Venrock, Carlyle Group, Honda, SMSC, and the world’s largest laptop maker, Taiwanese Quanta Computer.

When asked when—if ever—AR will become a mainstream technology, Spare had this to say:

“If you look at the things that are happening on the market today, it’s starting to happen. AR, like many other technologies, starts with very specific applications. However, augmented reality applications that involve three-dimensional input [like operating interfaces through physical gestures] will start appearing in a significant way this fall. Next year you will see a dramatic increase in the visibility and use of the technology, and by 2012 it will be commonplace.”

The idea is to hold up a box of Lego to a kiosk that consists of a webcam, a screen, and Metaio’s AR technology. Combining 3D animation with a live video feed, the assembled toy is projected on screen on top of the box the consumer is holding. It is then possible to view the finished toy on screen from all angles.

With consumer products, the costs of using something like AR have to be really low. So, instead of printing special packaging for Lego with the black and white markers sometimes involved with AR applications, the computer is using image recognition to recognize the box, eliminating the need for extra visual aids. While the system hasn’t been taught to recognize all of Lego’s hundreds of products, it does recognize a fair amount, especially toys in the City series, according to Metaio.

The effect is actually cool (watch the embedded video for how it works) and is something that Metaio thinks will help sell more products in-store. According to the company, purchase decisions in a store are mostly driven by customers’ excitement about a product. With toys like Lego, it can take hours of construction to see what the finished product really looks like. The digital box, Metaio argues, gives consumers — in this case, kids — a detailed idea of the toy when it’s assembled, thus sparking interest.

Metaio has been working on AR projects for a number of clients other than Lego, a lot of them in the automobile industry (two of the executives have a background with Volkswagen). Companies interested in applying Metaio’s technology include Toyota, Daimler, BMW, Peugeot and Volkswagen, among others. Industrial applications can involve using augmented reality in car maintenance. An example video (in German) shows a car mechanic looking at a car engine through AR goggles and seeing animated instructions projected on the live object, showing how to service the car.

According to an earlier discussion with Metaio, the company is also creating the world’s first “AR City” this year. Metaio wants to cover a certain physical location in the US with tons of AR data, which could result in very interesting proving grounds for the (still) fledgling technology. A privately held company that was founded in 2003, Metaio employs 60 people and has offices in South Korea and San Francisco, Calif. in addition to its Munich, Germany headquarters.

Metaio’s video showing the Lego kiosk in action: